middle classes, shopping also became a leisure activity, as the image of
women window-shopping reveals. They stand gazing through the vast
plate glass windows containing evocative displays of household textiles.
Women’s domestic interiors accompanied them on their shopping jour-
neys. They were visible in the railway station waiting rooms in which
they sat, the train carriages in which they travelled, and the department
stores, clubs, cafés, restaurants, hotels and theatres they visited. These
‘homes from home’ provided them with a level of comfort when they
ventured outside their homes, and helped them redefine themselves as
consumers as well as home-makers.
The domestic interior also exposed itself to the public sphere
through its developing relationship with the expanding mass media of
the period. Along with the advent of mass production, mass consump-
tion and the idea of the separate spheres, the expansion of the mass
media was a key feature of industrial modernity. Like the development of
‘homes from home’ the relationship of the media to the domestic sphere
served to facilitate and enhance the consumption of goods for the home.
Through images in magazines, trade catalogues and other printed mater -
ials, as well as through room constructions at exhibitions and trade fairs,
idealized domestic spaces stimulated desire and encouraged consumers
to construct their own modish domestic interiors through the purchase
of a new armchair or a piece of curtain fabric. Like the architecture which
contained it, the modern domestic interior was defined by its engage-
ment with the mass media.^10 Most significantly it was transformed
through that engagement into an idealized phenomenon used to
encourage the consumption of goods. In that idealized form the interior
itself became a mass medium, a vehicle for the transmission of modern
values of various kinds. Indeed, almost as soon as it had been created,
the modern domestic interior became an ‘object of desire’, so widely
represented that it rapidly became impossible to separate its idealized
forms from its realized manifestations.
The idealized interior still features strongly in today’s mass media.
The magazines on stationers’ shelves offer consumers a myriad of ‘modern’
options, from the country house style, to the Provençal look, to austere
minimalism, to a rich, oriental aesthetic, and many more besides. Over
the last few decades television has also embraced the design of the interior,
hosting a vast number of programmes on the subject ranging from ‘how
to’ and make-over shows, to voyeuristic glimpses into the homes of the
rich and famous. One of the most popular interior-focused programmes, 15006_018_Modern_Intro:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:31 Page 15